Ask Lemmy

@DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works

I speak both Portuguese (I'm Brazilian) and English, and I also understand a few loose words, phrases and symbols across different languages (including "dead" ones such as Sumerian/Akkadian, as I've been studying it for religious purposes). Some of these loose words and phrases and symbols also include neologisms and creations of my own, for example:

- nam-ush or nam-uš: transliterated Sumerian/Akkadian, the concept/personification of Death, as ush = death, and nam is the abstraction prefix. I tried to coin other words, epithets and phrases in Sumerian and Akkadian as well, even though little is known about Sumerian grammar.
- Vita mortem manducat, Mors manducat vitam: Latin for "Life devours death, Death devours life", symbolizing the symbiotic relationship between survival and death (eating involves a living being absorbing energy from what used to be another living being). The phrase tries to follow the Latin grammar.

I also do some kind of layman linguistic studies, also for religious purposes. For example: the word for "mother" is pretty much similar across every language out there, with the labial phoneme /m/ shared across them.

I also possess the knowledge about evolution of language (or what's so far known about it), such as how the letter A stemmed from the symbol for ox's head, which then became aleph, then alpha, then the Latin A.

I also know some alphabet letters enough to, at least, trying to pronounce the word or phrase (e.g. Cyrillic, some letters from Greek, some from Hebrew, fewer from abjad Arabic, among others).

As someone who codes since my childhood, dealing with languages is particularly "easier": even though I can neither fully understand nor read COBOL, I can notice many similarities with other languages I do know (BASIC); similarly, even though I can neither fully understand nor read Italian, I can notice many shared morphemes and phonemes with languages I do know (Portuguese).

I also kind of able to "speak ASCII hex code" (74 68 69 73), as well as Morse, fluently.

That all said, I feel neither better not worse than a monolingual. Knowing more than one language has its pros and cons.

One of the cons I would mention is this kind of situation where I remember the name for a concept in, say, English or other foreign language, while I'm speaking in Portuguese to an exclusively Portuguese-speaking person, but I can't recall the Portuguese equivalent at that very moment, even though Portuguese is my native language, so I end up saying the English word with no way for the other person to understand it, and the whole situation ends up feeling strange.

There's also the concept of "languageless thoughts" I experience often: things that I'm unable to express or explain, neither in Portuguese, nor in English, nor in any other language whose words I loosely know. It's particularly a phenomenon involving philosophical, religious or spiritual concepts, often in a sudden manner (gnosis).